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The law forbids the importation of fresh ones, and provides for the good treatment of those now in bondage. It also prohibits the slave-owner from separating a family; so that the wife and husband cannot be parted from each other, or from their children, except in the case of a crime having been committed by a member of the family.
They are now living under a pledge of their tremendous physical force to fasten the galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs of millions in the Southern states; they are liable to be called at any moment to suppress a general insurrection of the slaves; they authorize the slave-owner to vote on three fifths of his slaves as property, and thus enable him to perpetuate his oppression; they support a standing army at the South for its protection; and they seize the slave who has escaped into their territories, and send him back to be tortured by an enraged master or a brutal driver.
I cannot forbear paying a tribute of respect to the venerable Moses Brown, of Providence, Rhode Island, now living in virtuous and vigorous old age. He was a slave-owner in early life, and, unless I have been misinformed, a slave-dealer, likewise. When his attention became roused to religious subjects, these facts troubled his conscience.
In addition to having his immense cotton plantations cultivated by slave labor, the slave-owner soon learned that he could utilize these slaves as carpenters, painters, plasterers, bricklayers, blacksmiths and in all other fields of industrial occupations and usefulness.
Does the slave-owner own the man whom he whips within an inch of his life, and who dare not do anything without his permission? Does God, in any sense that corresponds with the longing of infinite love, own the men that reluctantly obey Him, and are simply, as it were, tools in His hands?
Social and religious reasons, derived from the community of nature and origin in man, reinforced by a vivid realisation of the sufferings of others, and appealing forcibly to the tender and sympathetic feelings, have co-operated with the economical considerations drawn from the wastefulness and comparative inefficiency of slave labour, and with what may be called the self-regarding reason of the hardening and debasing effect of slave-owning on the character of the slave-owner himself.
They are visible in those strict laws of segregation which show how much wider is the gulf between the races than it was under Slavery when the children of the white slave-owner, in Lincoln's words, "romped freely with the little negroes." They are visible above all in acts of unnatural cruelty committed from time to time against members of the dreaded race.
Away back in the fifties a man named Antrem, from New England, came to Brantly and, standing where the stone now stands, made an abolition speech. It was so bold an impudence that the citizens stood agape, scarcely able to believe their ears. At last the passive astonishment was broken by a slave-owner named Peel.
No Christian Church ought, he maintained, to admit a slave-owner to communion. No honest man ought to count a slave-owner among his friends. No political connection with slave-owners was tolerable. The Union, since it involved such a connection, was "a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell." Garrison publicly burnt the Constitution of the United States in the streets of Boston.
If this enormous power, this fabulous labour, had, been wielded or performed with a beneficent intention; if the man who seriously regarded himself as the owner of a third of the globe, with the inhabitants thereof, had attempted to deal with these extensive estates inherited from his ancestors with the honest intention of a thrifty landlord, an intelligent slave-owner, it would have yet been possible for a little longer to smile at the delusion, and endure the practice.
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